Subject: minutes from Orlando

From: April Marine <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1998 13:48:53 -0800 (PST)

Hi all,

Here are the minutes from the Orlando meeting. 

April
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                            Minutes of the
		   User Services Working Group (USWG)
                   IETF - Orlando, FL - December 1998

Recorded by April Marine.

USWG met in 3 sessions in Orlando.  Each session had its own scope.
These minutes cover all three sessions.

Session 1: Monday, December 7, 1998

This session had the most varied agenda.

- USV Area Report

It started with an overview of the Area and progress since the last
meeting.  Two groups Responsible Use of the Network (RUN) and Site
Security Handbook (SSH) have advanced drafts for IESG consideration
and did not meet in Orlando as most of their actions are done.  USWG
has two drafts that were discussed in Orlando.

-  TERENA Update

Yuri Demchenko of TERENA gave an update of recent activites of this
sister organization.  In particular, he highlighted the recently
published reports of the ETINU Task Force, recent developments of Web
caching, and the CHIC distributed web indexing pilot project.  He also
pointed out an effort regarding testing multilingual email clients.
He had a few samples of the reports in hardcopy and information was
provided regarding where to find them online.  Check out
http://www.terena.nl/libr/.

-  FYIs to "Historic"

The bulk of the time was spent in details related to the document
<draft-ietf-uswg-historic-00.txt> which is a first cut at defining
which old FYI documents are obsolete.  Each of the FYIs was discussed
briefly and the group decided whether to classify it as OK-as-is,
Obsolete (will not be updated), Need-to-update, or
Evolve-to-new-format.  The draft will be revised to reflect this
discussion.

The suggestion was also made and accepted not to issue a new FYI with
this information, but to update FYI1, thus following the pattern of
STD1 always giving the status of the STDs series.  Then readers will
always know to get FYI1 for the latest information on the FYI series.

Also, the status of some FYI documents was not necessarily black and
white.  Therefore, if necessary, some descriptive information about
the status of an FYI can be entered in the updated document.  An
example of this would be to point to the online version of the TERENA
Guide to Network Resource Tools.

- Future of the Net

An added order of business was a discussion of the suggestion sent to
the list that USWG develop a new FYI that clues people in to how
current work on various technologies will affect future network
services.  Some discussion took place about how to narrow the scope of
this document.  Should it stem from current WG efforts or from Area
Reports?  Some folks thought that the document idea was totally out of
scope for the group because it constituted advertising the IETF and
that should be ISOC's job.  However, if the work was given the slant
of educating users regarding unfamiliar standardization efforts about
which they were curious, that was acceptable.  It was unclear if the
audience were general net users or IETF newbie's.  Also unclear was
whether it would be one document or more, and whether it would be
hardcopy, online or both.

Volunteers for "future" project: Chris Burke, Yuri Demchenko, April
Marine, Ed Krol (will put input together)
========================================================================

Session 2.  Tuesday, December 8, 1999

The topic of this session was discussion of the revision of FYI 4.
Ray Plzak had put together input into a draft, which was the starting
point for the group.  The draft was <draft-ietf-uswg-fyi4-00.txt>.

Ray led the meeting.  He stepped through feedback he had already
received, looking for consensus and input.  He also discussed a few
meta-issues, such as whether the draft should have a glossary, what
references should be included, and which voice (2nd or 3rd) the
document should use.

Feedback was provided to Ray, as co-author/editor.  He will revise the
draft once more and ask again for comments from the working group.
Good progress has been made on this doc, so it may be at or near RFC
by the next meeting.  Further volunteers were added: Chris Burke
agreed to help with the glossary and April will add something for the
security considerations section.  That input should be to Ray by the
end of January; next draft will be mid-February and comments at the
end of Feb.

========================================================================

Session 3.  Wednesday, December 9, 1998
                                            
The topic of this session was evolving our publishing from
concentrating only on FYI RFC documents, to expanding to online or
other formatted documents.  We approached it from three points of
view: content, format, and process.  It was a brainstorming session as
this is a new idea, but the basic idea of the three points of view
follows.

"Content" refers to what we write about. What information will be
included?

"Format" refers to how we will publish it.  Many in the group had very
good ideas about format and exciting suggestions.  Some of them,
however, were voted to an amorphous "phase 2" after we'd had more
experience in scoping out the problem.

"Process" refers to the challenge of tying output from a WG to
something other than an RFC.  This would be new for the IETF.

Longer notes with many of the ideas brought up in the group were
posted to the mailing list.  Conclusions, however, included:

 - start with simple online documents in html, linked from the USV web
page.

 - later, the format can be revisited to try to both standardize it
and make any other modifications that resulted from the initial
learning process.

 - this work ties in quite a bit with "future of the net" discussion
in the first session of the WG.

 - some overlap of audience between the traditional net newbie and an
IETF newbie, so some confusion of scope there

 - if we want to address "hot topics" a good place to start would be
the BOFs and their agendas

 - we can take a yearly (or other periodic) "snapshot" of the online
information and publish it as an FYI.  This would also serve as an
archive and versioning mechanism.

 - use the format that is appropriate for the content, which is
determined by deciding who the audience is and what format is
appropriate for them.  In other words, we can use pictures now.

Content suggestions:

 - add the illustrations/diagrams someone suggested for FYI 4.
 - describe the groups that workwith the IETF and their relationships
 - describe the IETF Areas and what they do
 - new FYI 4 content
 - explanation of RFCs and their subseries
 - trends/futures of IETF/Internet work, understanding that the sum of
   the parts of the IETF does not equal the whole.
 - more meta-level info that would fall between the WG minutes and
   Area reports.  Try to get the ADs to capture and pass along more "hall
   conversation" info.  Get an AD's update of trends, overlaps, shared
   concerns re work, etc.
 - even info relevant only to the next IETF mtg would be
   useful. especially useful would be a synthesis/overview of the area
   and its progress.
 - need interpretation of info as well as a report of what happened.  Why
   is that progress important?  Why should I as a user care?  What are
   the broad goals of today's work?
 - be careful to distinguish "marketing" from "explaining" or "providing
   info" re IETF activities.
 - write mission statement for IETF
 - when putting info online, make it accessible to people with disabilities

Volunteers from meeting: Chris Burke, Ted Wolf, Marc Blanchet, Graham
Travers, Ed Krol, April Marine, maybe Ray when he finishes FYI 4.  (If
I missed putting your name on the volunteer list and you volunteered,
don't think you are off the hook! :-)